Jack Ponton, emeritus professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, said another 16,000 turbines would be required in order to replace petrol and diesel cars with electric vehicles.

“If you want to do this with wind turbines, you are talking about 16,000 more wind turbines, four times as many as we have at the moment, and I’ve estimated that would occupy some 90,000 square kilometres, which is approximately the size of Scotland.”

The academic – a member of Scientific Alliance Scotland, a group which promotes open-minded debate on issues such as climate change – believes the plan is “unworkable”…

The UK plans to phase out combustion engines by 2032. What happens when surges of holiday tourists arrive in a town without enough charging points? “Charge-rage” and long queues. Lets spend our holidays waiting for the car to fill.

Sure, eventually, with a lot of money we can build enough towers and wires and plug-holes, but if we want cars running on wind turbines we need to store the amps in batteries that stand still, so they can load it into batteries that travel.

UPDATE: Lionell Griffith in comments:

“Obviously, the only solution is to have car owners certified and to have get permission from a newly formed government bureaucracy for when, where, how long, and for what purpose they can use their cars. If you don’t have permission, it will be a felony to use your car for any purpose.

We can’t have the public going just anywhere anytime for frivolous trips to nowhere in particular. Clearly, it is a public health issue.”

POST NOTE: The headline is tongue-in-cheek. I can’t take the idea of converting a nation-to-electric-cars in just fifteen years seriously. Assuming we want to run a nation on electric cars, and assuming we can’t use nuclear power (for no good reason) and assuming we are are doing this to reduce CO2 and “change the weather”, only then does it make sense (in a fragile way) to use wind power.

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Rating: 9.5/10 (68 votes cast)

Britain can have electric cars or turn Scotland into a wind farm, which will it be then?, 9.5 out of 10 based on 68 ratings

Some time ago I pointed out to a greenie that I thought windmills looked awful and were a blight on the landscape. Their reply was that they looked beautiful. I responded asking what if they were drilling for oil. Silence.

There is now a move afoot to put wind farms offshore along what’s called the Gold Coast of California. And you can be certain that those trying to do this would yell “bloody murder” if the proposal was for oil rigs instead.

You can also be certain that those proposing this will have a way to make money from it. Count on it!

I wouldn’t say those look any better, but at least they aren’t amassed atop pristine hills, overlooking seasides, rolling country hills and the like, and which stand out like nudists at a tailor’s convention.

You should see the offshore ones cluttering up the Solway Firth, wrecking that beautiful bit of Scotland’s coast. There were plans for many more and there are some on the English side, visible from Maryport.

It’s truly amazing what level of nature’s destruction the Green loonies will accept and allow, just to to sustain their beliefs.

As I noted, if these windmills were drilling for oil, all hell would have broken loose before, during and after their construction:

- Article after article would appear in the Age, Their ABC, the Guardian etc on how these things were an assault on the climate.

- Noted climate worrier after climate worrier would wail about how there concrete towers of capitalism would accelerate climate change.

- Article after article would follow detailing breathlessly how third world countries were being raped and exploited for the rare earth minerals and other products needed to build these monstrosities.

- Greens loonies would be collecting every dead eagle, other bird and bat and laying them out in front of government buildings wailing about how wildlife was being murdered by these blenders from hell.

Roy, recently I saw a photo of Stirling Castle with the beautiful (well they were) Ochil Hills in the background. The view was totally bastardised by about 20 wind turbines between the Castle and the hills. I could not believe it and put the photo on Instagram for my extended family, some still in Scotland, to see and comment on. I remarked on what a dreadful thing to do to one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Not one of my family commented, not even my brother, who lives less than 20 miles from the castle. How on earth can people accept this perfidy?

Simple.. Road Tolls.
Replace rego and fuel taxation with a distance based tolling system using GPS tracking.
Even without the GPS assistance, the toll charges already far outweigh my fuel costs and getting more each year .
Infact , fuel is a minor cost compared to tolls, parling, insurances, let alone depreciation..

Go along a road.
Look left and look right as you go and you will see the true beneficiary/user of the road: the landowners.
The road provides most of the value the owner(s) of the land the road provides access for, enjoy.
They pocket the benefit of that value as a “capital gain.”
Any form of tax which is not a charge against the land value received through the service provided is a bad tax.

Most of our taxes are bad taxes, which is probably why they are called “taxes” because of the economic “strain” the impose.

I guess the other thing to note is: fossil fuels pay a heavy road tax.

Fossil fuels are the road surface as well. What will they use when no oil is being used. Concrete again?

Almost all of the asphalt used today for paving comes from petroleum crude oil. Liquid asphalt is the heaviest part of the crude—what’s left after all the volatile, light fractions are distilled off for products such as gasoline. In Europe and Canada it is commonly called bitumen.

Robert, fair point. Addendum to the post added:
POST NOTE: The headline is tongue-in-cheek. I can’t take the idea of converting a nation-to-electric-cars in just fifteen years seriously. Assuming we want to run a nation on electric cars, and assuming we can’t use nuclear power (for no good reason) and assuming we are are doing this to reduce CO2 and “change the weather”, only then does it make sense (in a fragile way) to use wind power.

I live in Auckland: The City of Sails which should be a warning. No cars, motorcycles and only one cyclist I’ve seen, have ever used sails. But the “tacking duels” everywhere on land have to be seen to be believed!

Indicators? Que?
Lanes? Que? Just keep out of MY way!
Stop Signs? red Give Ways but only if the other vehicle is Way Bigger than yours.
Give Way Signs? See above.

Obviously, the only solution is to have car owners certified and to have get permission from a newly formed government bureaucracy for when, where, how long, and for what purpose they can use their cars. If you don’t have permission, it will be a felony to use your car for any purpose.

Gone will be the days of packing the car, loading wife and kids, and going off for a random weekend getaway. Driving is a privilege and not a right. We can’t have the public going just anywhere anytime for frivolous trips to nowhere in particular. Thereby dumping massive quantities of that most hideous poison CO2 into the atmosphere. Clearly, it is a public health issue.

Additionally, it is a public safety issue. Think of the emergency or police vehicles also standing in long lines waiting for them to be charged. They MUST have priority. Hence access to the charging stations must be rationed and strictly scheduled before use.

Blank out that the above policy was necessitated by prior governmental action based upon a false premise that we must limit CO2 emissions. That action destroyed the fossil fuel industry, the coal power generation industry, and eliminated the legal use of the internal combustion engine. All totally unnecessary and far more harmful to one and all than the minor inconvenience of waiting a few minuets in line to fuel your car.

In fact, from the government’s perspective, the prior government action had its intended effect. It failed spectacular and necessitated an even larger expansion of government power to correct the failure. Which, in turn will fail even more spectacularly and will necessitate further growth of government.

A similar bill is pending in Sacramento. It won’t pass today but a future legislature might pass it and governors lately are left leaning so it might become law.

Unfortunately for all electric cars to date there has yet to be a battery that will charge up again in the 5 minutes or so it takes my to fill my tank. And then there are the roughly 300 miles of absolutely nowhere to get across the desert to Phoenix. Is the range adequate for that? Will they build charging stations out along Interstate 10 or 40?

They will eventually do it, fixing something that was not broken and breaking what was not broken with the very same fix to the original non problem. Such is the fate when the inmates run the asylum.

They neither think through their plans before implementing them nor look back to see if what they’ve done is actually working. It’s full speed ahead right in front of your nose. You dare not look either left or right lest you see the harm you’ve done. It’s just onward to even greater harm.

Mine is an amazing piece of engineering excellence. Yes it’s a bit thirsty but it goes literally anywhere. It has a range of 850 kilometres while towing a trailer and gets me from Perth to Norseman without the need to refuel. It keeps me safe in the bush and doing the vast distances around Australia. It carries a real spare tyre (plus an additional one for really remote travel). Every one horse town has a Toyota person who can find spare parts and tell you how to fix it if it ever stops (mine never has in 320,000 kilometres; touch wood).

30% ‘dead weight’ – what a stupendous waste of energy and drain on resources, perpetually sentenced to lugging that around for the life of the vehicle. It would be doomed were it not for ideological diktat, cultural marxism and a passive acceptance of bureaucratic rule.

My car has a 6 litre V8 and weighs about 2000kg and has a fuel tank of about 70 litres. That amount of fuel weighs around 54kg and on the open road will take the car about 750km. The fuel payload with a full tank is a mere 2.7% of the car’s mass and gets less as the fuel is used. The car can be refuelled in about 5 mins at numerous locations.

Correct in relation to the number of wind farms to run the EVs and calculations I did a couple of months ago showed something similar.

The real problems with this Policy of the UK banning sales of all but electric vehicles by 2040 is that Nobody thought it through or ran any calculations to see if it was even feasible before announcing the policy.

Michael Gove (Secretary of State at DEFRA) announced this policy in July and then DEFRA, Department for Transport, BEIS and OLEV (Office for Low Emission Vehicles) were told to find out how to do it.

One bright in-house ‘scientist’ at DfT answered my queries relating to the CO2 emissions just from Battery manufacture by saying the IVL study was rubbish because all Tesla’s batteries were made using renewable energy. This comment was based on a Tesla web page that said the Nevada facility would be all renewable – well maybe one day but it cetrtainly ain’t yet.

The IVL study had found that with 50% renewable energy used for battery manufacture then each tesla was responsible fpr 15 – 20 Tonnes of CO2 emissions Before it left the factor. That’s equivalen to 8 years driving a normal car. but as battery life is around 8-10 years it means that by 8-10 years in there is another 6 years of emissions for the replacement battery.

Chinese manufacturers are predictd to control 65-85% of EV battery manufacture by 2025 and Nissan agreed the sale of all of their global battery manufacturing plants to Chinese investors in August of this year.

If the UK was able to reach a level of 50% renewable energy for battery manufacturing it would Only Increase UK CO2 emissions by around 18% from 2015 levels and much higher by 2048!! Given that China is going to Double its CO2 emissions by 2030 = as agreed through the Paris Climate Agreement – it is vrey unlikely that the UK will manage to get anywhere near as high as 50% energy in battery manufacture. Expotring the emissions to China or elsewhere doesn’t make them magically disappear.

That 18%(++) increase in CO2 emissions is without generating the energy to run them.

I took all of the relevant calculations and background papers on both manufacture and generation to a meeting with Theresa May (the UK Prime Minister) a couple of weeks agoand went through these with her. I don’t think she really understood what I was explaining to her. It was probably a complete waste of time as the Green Blob in the UK Civil Service will, I have little doubt, fall back on the type of nonsense that all batteries will be made with renewable energy and that by some magic the cars will be powered with renewable energy.

No need to apologise , we are all impressed that you managed an audience with the UK prime minister – presumably you are a business or academic person of some distinction amongst your peers (or Peers). I wonder if the latest prediction from the UK Met Office of another very cold winter, with its implication for UK electricity supply would have had any impact on her.

Afraid not at all distinguished in any way – she happens to be my MP and I felt she needed to know how bad this policy can become , so I arranged to see her. I have met her on odd occasions in the past, long before she became pm.

On the eve of the Brexit referendum I was out canvassing for Brexit with the car covered in Vote Leave boards, and saw a group of woolly Lib Dems outside the local railway station canvassing to Remain (shackled to the EU). Had to stop and shout to them that we wanted our sovereignty back and an end to rule by ‘those idiots in Brussels’.

A lady, who was campaigning for Remain with them turned round and cried out “I’m in Brussels a lot, we’re not idiots’.

I repeated what I shouted before, smiled and waved and left with a parting ‘Vote Leave’. .

No guesses as to who she was ….. and she wouldn’t be my choice for pm.

To add to the above, as a minor difficulty – 43% of UK car owners have No Parking at or adjacent to their property, nothing will change that and civil servants seem to think that somehow a solution will appear. If not then urban pavements and roads will be criss-crossed with cables as people try to recharge their car on the street.

The current generation of ‘Fast’ chargers (3-4 hours) that can be used at home take so much power that if you put the kettle on you will overload the circuit and trip the electrics!! To get to the next generation of fast chargers will require domestic rewiring of every UK property and an uprated supply from the grid to every house.

All of this nonsense to try and achieve Maurice Strong’s political aims of an unelected socialist-marxist global government.

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that .. the threat of global warming.. would fit the bill…. the real enemy, then, is humanity itself….we believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is a real one or…. one invented for the purpose.” Maurice Strong – speech to Club of Rome – and “invented” referred specifically to ‘Global Warming !

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?” and those words encapsulate what lies behind and is the sole reason for ‘Global Warming / Climate Change’ .

Global Warming / Climate Change and CO2 started with Maurice Strong of the UN , UNEP and IPCC . He is credited as the founder of ‘climate change’ and the IPCC, and as a matter of fact created both. If you check him out you will see his politics and what the intention was behind the idea of climate change and how it could be used to create an unelected world government – this was his second attempt after his earlier one to create a World Government through the UN failed. Neither attempt has seen Democracy as having any place in it – as is well illustrated by the structure of the EU.

After some 20+ years involvement at the very heart of UN policymaking Strong was forced out and had most, if not all, of his honours stripped away over money disappearing (~$1m) from UN coffers into one of Strong’s companies.

Strong then fled the West and sought refuge in China where his cousin had lived – she was a member of Comintern and had lived with Chairman Mao for 2 years. Strong was then well looked after in China where he had business interests and had for many years been close to the leadership as he had also been with the leadership of soviet and post-soviet Russia.

Sadly I don’t think you are being facetious, and actually believe these delusions.

The comments about Africa are just childish ignorance, of both history and economics, but the idea that The Chinese are eliminating poverty is dangerous. Poverty ins Africa is being eliminated, where markets are allowed and not interfered with. Tanzania is a case in point, where the numbers living in absolute poverty have halved since 2011 and the introduction of market reforms. Or you could look at West and East Germany, North and South Korea, China before and after market reforms, Venezuela before and after doing away with markets.

Or are you a history denier?

As for the Silk Road, which has already run into massive problems, just building stuff doesn’t create wealth – ask Japan.

African slaves were a natural resource, a labour saving device for the rich and fatuous of Europe. They say that American wealth was built on the backs of African slaves and Irish immigrants, hand in hand with laissez faire capitalism.

‘As for the Silk Road, which has already run into massive problems, just building stuff doesn’t create wealth – ask Japan.’

I’m aware of Japan’s folly in building infrastructure which is hardly used, just like China built ghost cities, but in the long term the Belt and Road will enhance freedom and economic prosperity.

‘Or are you a history denier?’

North Korea is a misfit state, out of date in the 21st century, while Venezuela stands as a warning to democracies everywhere.

Capitalism needs new markets to prosper and I would like to discuss the Third Way, if you can spare a minute.

To add to the above, as a minor difficulty – 43% of UK car owners have No Parking at or adjacent to their property, nothing will change that and civil servants seem to think that somehow a solution will appear. If not then urban pavements and roads will be criss-crossed with cables as people try to recharge their car on the street.

Indeed.

” Many areas of the UK, including large parts of
our cities, have residential areas where off-street parking is not an
option, presenting a barrier to plug-in vehicle adoption for many
residents. In order to help their residents overcome this barrier, local
authorities can sign up to this scheme, giving access to funding to help
with the costs of procurement and installation of on-street charging
points in such residential areas. ”

Just as a comparison, Australia is currently going through the pain of the roll-out of its National Broadband Network (NBN).

The NBN was initially costed at $4.7 billion by the incompetent Labor Government when it started the roll-out back in 2007. It is currently costed at $49.0 billion and rising fast. It will likely hit the $90 to $100 billion mark before its finished.

It is a red flag.

The NBN is already a sub-optimal system. What users pay for is not what users get. The speeds are slower in many cases than those obtainable over the old copper wire network. Newer wireless technology is rapidly superseding the NBN’s fibre technology.

I can’t wait to see the disaster that’ll unfold if an Australian government ever decides to roll out residential street EV charging points.

From an individual house viewpoint, this may be correct, assuming that each house doesn’t try to recharge a completely flat EV car battery overnight. In the US, the average car driving is 24,000 kms/year or 65kms/day. The charging requirement is 4,500 kWH/year or 12kWH/day. But this is still 50% more than today’s average household daily power requirements.

Good point – I didn’t look at the number of households in the US. There are about 126 million houses and about 240 million cars and similar “light vehicles”, so ratio of cars per household is about 1.9 cars per house. OK, so if all EVs, that means each house would require double its existing daily power usage on average. And that’s not even thinking about trying to charge 2 cars in a household simultaneously from flat – that would require around 160 KWh. Now it’s getting scary.

Hmm, I’m still off – didn’t allow for the additional energy required to charge the batteries. (Headed a technical design team and have designed battery chargers so should know better.) For 2 cars, closer to 200 kWh is required.

When will they ever understand that the most efficient form of energy storage is liquid fuel? Trying to store energy in metal? Tell ‘em they’re dreaming.
For the Tesla S: The 85 kWh battery pack weighs 540 kg and contains 7,104 lithium-ion battery cells in 16 modules wired in series.
For a 60 litre tank on a “normal” car, the fuel weighs just 44 kgms.

This is the second one I’ve seen since the Model 3 was introduced in July this year (2017) to make headlines somewhere in the world for illuminating the landscape. According to Yahoo Finance Tesla has produced a total of 260 Model 3s at its Fremont, California, factory since production began in early July.

2 out of 260. Woof!

Were I an insurance company, I would set an annual premium of USD35,000 for each car. That’s what they cost. New. With a self-immolation rate of 0.77%, so far in just four months.

It was one of her predecessors, Maggie Thatcher, who started it to enable her to destroy the miner’s union. Thatcher was a chemist, so she knew it wasn’t correct, but it was a big political spade to swat the union(s) with. So poor Teresa May wouldn’t know.

The problem is bunkum. No one speaks better bunkum with a bigger, brighter and more convincing vocabulary than pseudoscientists, who lace their hokum utterances with scientistic jargon. It fools more people for longer than anything remotely resembling the truth, especially with the repetitious and reinforcing network of “bunkum” checkers. They call themselves “fact checkers” but they sure aren’t. That’s the job of the MSM: hunt the truth down and bunkumise it. Their trade is now Fake News, and their job is to keep the propaganda “pure.”

What would all the greenies do if all these wind turbines created enough push or pull and the planet itself started to move in another direction? Does anybody actually know if that could happen? Don’t laugh. Does anybody really know? Imagine the planet leaving it’s orbit zipping around in space powered by wind!

The Earth’s rotation is getting slower due to transfer of momentum to moon through gravitational forces and tidal friction. That is determined to be 1.7ms/century.

For the earth to permanently change rotation rate or move in orbit it needs to eject or receive mass or interact with other external masses in a way that transfers inertial energy. There are reversible process like changes in atmospheric mass and changes in polar ice volumes that can alter rotational speed.

Wind on earth is created by thermal imbalances. They are part of earth’s heat engine driven by the sun. The majority of wind energy dissipates to heat as friction. Some does physical work moving water and particles but that eventually dissipates as heat as well. Wind turbines extract kinetic energy from the wind, transfers that to electrical energy and then it eventually gets dissipated as heat. Even if it goes from electric energy, to chemical energy in a battery to eventually be used to push a car over the ground through air it is producing heat as the eventual outcome.

Ultimately that heat becomes OLR that goes out to the universe. So the sun provided the high grade heat that was converted to wind energy, converted to another form of energy to eventually become low grade heat that gets sent out to the universe. The path that heat took from arrival to departure does not affect earths inertia.

Wind turbines just provide a different path for the dissipation of the kinetic energy from the wind to heat. Considering land surface alone there is enough wind energy to supply 40 times more energy than is used world wide in all current forms. The current wind generation output is less than 1% of total energy so about 1/4000th of the land wind energy. It may be detectible in windspeed but it would require very precise measurement.

UM, no.
There is an incoming heat flux of around 1kW per square metre at the surface that gets divided between light, heat, wind, waves and a number of other losses such as chemical processes in Plants and animals. The wind and waves are a reasonant amplification, extracting a substantial fraction will damp the wind and waves to the point no energy can be extracted. Not only that you can’t extract all the energy in the wind, as wind passes the turbine, if you were to extract all the energy reducing it to zero velocity the air would pile up behind the windmill creating a reverse pressure gradient. There has to be enough velocity remaining to ensure the pressure gradient doesn’t form. This means only 1/2 the available wind energy can be harvested. Of Course if the wind isn’t exactly perpendicular to the windmill there are even more losses. And then there is the wasted energy from the top of the windmill up to the top of atmosphere. The result of these factors means that less than 0.1% of solar energy could be feasibly harvested from the wind or less than around 1 Watt per square metre. Solare panel get 3-5 Watts per square meter (on a 24 hour averaged basis)

However, just as man can control the climte, he/she can also control the earths rotation speed. How will be your question. The answer is to orientate the wind turbines opposite to the earths rotation and return the power from solar PV to the turbines effectively turning the turbine into a fan. No further explanation is required ,problem solved!

Electric cars will have to make the transition from expensive second car useful in some travel circumstances to reliable first car used for all family needs. This implies extensive travel, heavy loads of luggage and people, considerable use of heaters, lights, wipers etc etc.

I don’t know when or if this will happen unless battery technology improves considerably.

Second, some means will have to be found for home charging when a significant proportion of British houses do not have driveways or a garage.

I suspect hybrids will achieve greater use than pure electric vehicles

As has been pointed out by others, the critical constraint for electric vehicles is the worldwide shortage of specific minerals such as lithium, cobalt and rare earths that are essential for manufacture of batteries and high efficiency electrical motors. The discussion I saw was focused on Tesla production, and suggested a limit of about 250,000 per year, well short of Musk’s target. At that rate it might take longer than 13 years to replace all ICE vehicles on the road today.

Another case of reality having no relationship to political pronouncements.

“Another case of reality having no relationship to political pronouncements.”

That’s just it. Their core belief is their political pronouncements create reality according to their wish. Then if reality doesn’t cooperate, they will simply sacrifice enough humans to their god of unrestrained use of governmental coercive force so that reality submits to their commands.

That this has never worked is not recognized as a relevant factor. They believe their gang will do it right for a change. All that is needed to succeed is sufficient human sacrifice.

More and more every year the Western civilisations move closer to the Marxist-communist model of command economies where production, supply, price and use (including rationing) are centrally dictated according to targets.

Precisely what Global Warming was invented for and the IPCC was set up to achieve.

If we want to live in democracies in the near future we have to be prepared to fight for that now and to re-establish the over-riding principle that underpins the USA – Government for the people by the people.

If we don’t we will find ourselves being ruled by an unaccountable and unelected global government whose aims are unrecognisable to and un-reconcilable with ours.

The EU is a practice run…unelected bureaucrats bullying us with their miserable, stupid, numerous regulations. DownUnder we are living with all sorts of red tape, ridiculous petty regulations, all accompanied by ever-increasing fees.
To all meddling bureaucrats…get out of our lives and let us be responsible for our individual lives. Stop bullying us. I’m sick of all the form-filling intrusive nosy-parkering (sticky-beaking hereabouts) supposedly to stop various nasty things happening to a tiny minority of whatever-is-the-cause-of-the-day. Criminals won’t stop being criminals, id1ots won’t stop being id1ots, unkind people won’t stop being unkind and so on but the rest of us end up being more and more controlled with more and more of our hard-earned being removed from us. Whatever happens, there will always be those who are determined to try hard for the Darwin Award. In the meantime, don’t try to be responsible for your own actions and welfare; let Mummy Nanny State see to everything.

Seems to me that the nanny state along with the payment of ever-increasing and ever-widening ‘state benefits’ to more and more people (in the West) is a device to remove individual responsibility and self reliance. That way people become ever-more reliant upon the state, more amenable to its instructions and more prepared to accept without question its dictats and ‘guidance’.

I can’t help but think that the ‘safe-spaces’ that are now being created in universities across the UK where people can either escape or ‘recover’ from something they have heard or seen that might conceivably upset them because it doesn’t conform to their own world view is just another step in the ‘process’.

Those who seek an unelected and anti-democratic world government know they must first pacify, subdue and render powerless – or at least convince people they are powerless – the general population if this is to be achieved.

Social engineering at its worst, its most insidious and its most dangerous for the future of democracy and freedom. It is creating a modern-day form of serfdom that will end democracy if we don’t stand up to it.

The EU as you rightly say is a ‘practice run’ for an unelected and unaccountable world government – I have long believed that and often made that very point. It tests what can be achieved without the voter understanding what is happening.

It has adopted the failed and totally discredited soviet model of command economies in many key areas. The EU dictates what can be produced where and by whom. (Electric vehicle only policies across the EU are just another example of Soviet-style dictats making use of the falsehood of Global Warming).

Agriculture for example with the Common Agricultural Policy and quotas. When milk quotas were introduced and imposed by the EU the UK, previously a large net exporter of dairy products, was turned overnight into a net importer. UK farmers were given less production quota than was needed to meet the everyday needs of the British population and dairy farmers were forced out of business or even into bankruptcy in droves. French farmers were given a massive quota to enable them to expand dairying and to fill the artifical shortfall the EU had created in Britain. (A calculated and deliberate wealth and business transfer, but one that our elected politicians had no control over)

The Common Fisheries Policy is another example where UK fishing waters were handed over to EU control, carved up and the bulk of fishing quota in UK waters was given to France, Spain and Portugal putting over 100,000 British fishermen out of business and out of work. Once busy fishing ports are now a shadow of their former selves.

To add insult to injury the EU then used British financial contributions to the EU to give grants to Spanish, Portuguese and French fishermen to buy new and bigger boats to fish in British waters !

Another appalling part of the CFP and quota is that it is now so species specific that every year hundreds of thousands of tonnes of dead fish have to be dumped back into the sea because to land them would be ‘over quota’ – a very serious offence that leads to massive fines and even confiscation of the boat. And then the EU weep crocodile tears over certain fish species declining – when their policy has been the biggest cause. The EU even made it an offence a few years ago for a British beach fisherman to catch or land a Bass – £1,000 fine.

The EU was carefully constructed to remove democracy and hand power to the unelected and unaccountable because its founders believed (and went on record) that the voter was incapable of making the ‘right’ decision. They knew that voters would object to their country being a subservient state to the EU and so created a a fig leaf of democracy in national parliaments which are required to implement every EU Directive through their own parliament and legislative system – thus leaving the voter to believe it was their own elected politicians that made whatever law is being made. It also gave the opportunity for Europhiles to claim that the EU was not dictating our laws but they were made by our government through parliament.

I am infuriated by the sheer impertinance of these unelected bossy-boots eurocrats/bureaucrats. Words fail me at times. What you say here is what I want to say, again and again, to all those people who just cannot see what is going on.

That’s just it. Their core belief is their political pronouncements create reality according to their wish. Then if reality doesn’t cooperate, they will simply sacrifice enough humans to their god of unrestrained use of governmental coercive force so that reality submits to their commands.

It’s called war. Start a big enough one, and when it’s all over, the people left will be grateful to just be alive – and will accept anything that smacks of pre-war normalcy. Even if it isn’t. Hell, they’ll be happy if they can put food on the table once a day.

Exactly, and do you think the environmentalists will allow lithium and rare earth extraction and refining to scale up to the levels required to support a vehicle industry on today’s scale? Not bloody likely. Did I mention that lithium is extracted by electrolysis of molten salts? how’s that for a carbon footprint?

The proposed bans on new internal combustion-powered cars in Britain, Germany, California etc will turn the clock back a century, to a time where private automobiles are the privilege of the rich, and the proles will have to be content with public transit, traveling only where and when their masters deem it appropriate.

For example, take lithium. Until more recently we had one mine (Greenbushes) which was the world’s largest supplier of lithium and tantalum. Now we have three operating mines with Mt Marion and Mt Cattlin up as well. Pilgangoora is planning to be huge (Pilbara Minerals) and there’s more hopefuls in the wings. Also Greenbushes is planning to double its capacity over the next few years. This is all public information.

Rare earths are still largely supplied from China (Mongolian region mostly) but we have a producer in WA as well in Lynas’ Mt Weld operation (concentrate further processed in Malaysia). Again we have other hopefuls in WA (let alone the rest of the world) such as the Browns Plains Project up north.

Cobalt is largely a by-product from nickel mining, and nickel is in the doldrums. But there’s no shortage of known deposits waiting to be mined again should prices justify it.

Sure there might be short-term shortages as demand takes off, but the minerals are not in short supply (in the medium to longer term).

The good news is that those who don’t want to wait for winds to blow (but not too hard!) or batteries to charge can always take the Hyperloop.

The bad news is that the one mile of Hyperloop in existence is already a rust bucket. (Nobody told Elon about tipping wet cement into a steel pipe. People expect him to know everything!)

So, on second thoughts, buy a cement-free Tesla. There’ll be lots of cheeseburgers and styrofoam coffee bringing meaning to life at filling points. If your car runs flat there’s bound to be a light rail to take you to some footy stadium or mega-mall. From there you might be able to get a bus home. It’s what Sustainable Development is all about.

16,000 windmills for proposed EV’s by 2032? Where do eco-policy makers think they’ll get the money? Ever deeper diktat and theft? It is likely the ‘dependency ratio’ in the population will increase, though in recent years the impact of an ageing population in the UK has also been mitigated by a rise in net migration levels. Pettinger 2016 Economics Blog

Furthermore,

By 2032 the population of the UK is projected to increase by over 10 million (17%) and the number in the oldest old population is projected to more than double, reaching 3.1 million (4% of the total population). The percentage of the UK population aged 65 and over is projected to increase to 22.5%.

Over the next 20 years the population aged 65-84 will rise by 39% and those over 85 by 106%.

People will work out whats going on, dont worry….they can only sugar coat it for so long under pretty and fancy sounding names until the ugly reality is obvious for all to see.

We need to call it what it is – a reboot of the infamous T4 Program.

Interestingly, yet again, this insanity runs against Biblical principles – in the Bible old age is revered and respected :

“Wisdom is with aged men, With long life is understanding.” ( Job 12:12 )
“The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the gray head.” ( Prov 20:29 )
“You younger men, likewise, be subject to your elders; and all of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, for GOd is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” ( 1 Peter 5:5 )
“The elders who rule well are to be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching.” ( 1 Tim 5:7 )

Many people who had the wisdom of years were used as part of governanace for cities or countries.

But the Agenda 21 flunkies will use flowery language to dress up what may become forced / co-erced “euthanasia” as “benevolent” – which is all based around an unproven “crisis” of CAGW from Occultists who worship thier mythical “Gaia” earth goddess. The co-ordinated attacks on Christianity across a broad area make a lot more sense if you see the antithesis of Christianity working within the UN and UN-supporting govts world wide….

The preoccupation of these UN ideologues with “double benefit” suggests that controlling the senior end of the population with proxies like power poverty, cold, health-rationing policies (excluded because of high BMI or smoking status for example) may already be occurring. The ease with which they readily constrain millions in poverty in Africa betrays the UNEP ‘transformational’ agenda.

“Here, for the first time in public, is Javier’s entire collection of massive, “consensus” climate science prediction failures. This collection is carefully selected from only academics or high-ranking officials, as reported in the press or scientific journals. Rather than being exhaustive, this is a list of fully referenced arguments that shows that consensus climate science usually gets things wrong, and thus their predictions cannot be trusted.”

No dams in Australia, so no hydro. No nuclear. No coal or gas. No timber harvesting. This is becoming the windmill and battery country. Of course neither work but who cares as long as coal is paying all the bills and heating and cooling all the houses. We do not need manufacturing anyway. Just buy it all overseas with the money earned from coal and iron.

The only thing Left will be Getup and Labor and the Greens. Plus Malcolm and Lucy.

‘As a pure EV, it can go 70 miles on a single charge, but with its gas-guzzling aid that rises to 400 miles. Its green credentials are, therefore, limited, but it does meet the “zero emission capable” requirement that will be introduced for all new taxis on January 1st, 2018.’

I have little doubt that electric cars will one day perhaps replace all internal combustion engines; probably closer to 100 years from now, not in the near future as proposed by some twits. It will be a gradual transition as it must be for several practical reasons. First and foremost the battery technology has to be far more advanced to allow for about the same or less charge time as refilling a normal car, longer cycles and cheaper replacement. Those features alone will take decades to become viable for the public. My guess is it won’t be based on lithium batteries; perhaps even no batteries but some integrated power source yet to be developed. So for now fossil fuel powered cars are here to stay for a very long time. Global warming alarmists need to just get over it and stop making really stupid claims such as the one from Britain.

About the only way electric cars will be useful is if someone develops a small, cheap, portable fusion generator that can be used to provide the power to the electric motors. Batteries will never cut it no matter how they try.

Britain could be saved by my proposed new invention , I’m still only just in the idea and concept stage but willing to share my idea .

I propose a slim vertical platform around 1.5 metres long , it has four wheels one of which thats attached by some sort of friction capturing device to a shaft that has a foot rest at either end , approximately 180 degrees apart .
One wheel is to be used to aid steering and the last two for stability , this is about as far as I gone with the idea but think I’m on a winner as it only uses human effort to propel it .

My idea involves a triangular piece of sustainably harvested wood lying horizontally. The ‘back end’ of the isoceles shaped platform would have a wheel fixed at each end. The front end would have a moveable wheel for steering. Motive power could be supplied by a short mast holding a sail.
Completely natural with no gas emissions (except from the bean eating numbskull green who’d be the only one stupid enough to use it). I am willing to develop the idea to limited production on receiving a mere $US5 billion subsidy.

Umm, ok then. What happens when the wind drops? I remember very frustrating dinghy races when the sea surface was glassy flat and we baked in the sun! A goodly breeze was much more enjoyable. One was totally reliant on the wind of the day. Too little was tedious and boring and tiring. Too much and races were cancelled. Just right and a great day was had unless someone misjudged and boats were off the water for repair!

ONE in two Australians believes that the Paris accord on climate change should be dumped if breaking the agreement delivered cheaper domestic power prices, exposing a deep electoral division over Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s commitment to honouring the target.

Pity someone hasn’t developed a nuclear car — zero emissions and wouldn’t it be nice to measure the time between fills in decades.

The British plan is utter madness. If they really want a 100% electric fleet the only practical answer is to NOT rely on batteries. Given that they have to run beefy cables to all the charging stations anyway, just run the cables over or under the roads and have pantographs or inductive pickups on the vehicles. A small battery is all you’d need for backstreets, driveways, etc. This could even, conceivably, allow heavy road transport to become electric (it works for trains), and lets you run your aircon/heater while stuck in a traffic jam without worrying that you’re running down your battery.

Here is Matt Ridley’s article on the fra-dulent wind industry via the GWPF. The so called mitigation of their so called CAGW is the greatest con and fra-d in history. Even Dr Hansen called Paris COP 21 just BS and fra-d and he called a belief in S&W like believing in the tooth fairy and Easter bunny. I can provide more data and evidence from the EIA and IEA about their unreliables if required.

Remember Dr Lomborg says COP 21 will cost one to two trillion $ a year to achieve no measurable change in temp by 2100. IOW it is BS and fra-d.

“We urgently need to stop the ecological posturing and invest in gas and nuclear

“The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.

Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.

As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.

It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.”

The irony of it all – aiming for more renewables, electric cars and now battery factories. It will lead to massive job losses as all these require far less people compared to competing industries, and in the long run will require none at all as they will be run by robots – all electric of course. So people like Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk are actually running on a political platform to reduce jobs, not grow them. The left again show how they deliver the exact opposite of what they promise.

Objectives
4 The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields.
5 To achieve the political and social values of equality, democracy, liberty and social co- operation inherent in this objective, the Australian Labor Party stands for:
(a) redistribution of political and economic power so that all members of society have the opportunity to participate in the shaping and control of the institutions and relationships which determine their lives;
(b) establishment and development of public enterprises, based upon federal, state and other forms of social ownership, in appropriate sectors of the economy;
(c) democratic control and strategic social ownership of Australian natural resources for the benefit of all Australians;
(d) maintenance of and support for a competitive non-monopolistic private sector, including small business and farming, controlled and owned by Australians, operating within clear social guidelines and objectives;
etc

One correction – first line should read:The Australian Labor Party and the new Liberal Party are democratic socialist parties and have a common objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields.

There will be a massive increase in new coal powered stations etc by 2040 according to the IEA and other sources. This boom in coal will mainly come from SE Asia. OZ will supply a lot of this massive increase but we are too stupid and gutless to make use of our own cheap and reliable coal at home. Why is it so?

“The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that about 100 GW of new coal-fired power generation capacity is expected to come online in Southeast Asia by 2040, more than doubling the region’s current coal power capacity. Global coal-fired generation capacity to grow by nearly 50% over today’s levels.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says the need for cheap electricity in Southeast Asia will drive global demand for coal for power generation through 2040, even as many countries continue to retire coal-fired plants and cancel projects for new coal facilities.

IEA, which is set to release its World Energy Outlook 2017 on November 14, this week said India and Southeast Asia will account for the majority of the use of coal in the coming years, as those areas’ economies continue to grow and demand for electricity rises.

“Coal maintains a strong foothold in [Southeast Asia’s] projected consumption, not only because it is markedly cheaper than natural gas, but also because coal projects are in many cases easier to pursue as they do not require the capital-intensive infrastructure associated with gas,” the IEA said in a report in advance of the release of the November outlook.

The agency said about 100 GW of new coal-fired power generation capacity is expected to come online in Southeast Asia by 2040, increasing the region’s installed capacity to about 160 GW. The IEA said 40% of the new capacity will be built in Indonesia. The group said Vietnam, the second-largest consumer of coal in Southeast Asia behind Indonesia, will become the region’s largest importer of coal by 2040.

A report this week by Wood Mackenzie, a UK-based research and consulting firm with offices worldwide, including five in the U.S., said thermal coal imports by Southeast Asia will more than double to 226 million metric tons by 2035, up from 85 million metric tons today. The group said imports into Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and other parts of South Asia will jump to 284 million metric tons during that period, a 72% increase from this year’s levels.

At the same time, Chinese imports of coal—China in 2016 again became the world’s top importer of coal, overtaking India—will drop about 40% over the next two decades as the country ramps up its use of other energy sources, including wind and particularly solar, where it dominates the world market in terms of installed solar capacity and the production of solar panels.

China this year has canceled plans for more than 100 new coal plants, although Chinese companies are either building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants worldwide, according to Urgewald, a German environmental group. Urgewald in July said more than 1,600 coal-fired power plants were either under construction or being planned in 62 countries, a number that would increase global coal-fired generation capacity by 43% over today’s levels.

Kiah Wei Giam, a principal analyst for coal and gas markets at Wood Mackenzie, this week at the Singapore International Energy Week said: “Coal is still the most affordable technology in power generation,” despite “pushback in coal development” due to concerns about pollution. Giam said coal demand will remain high at least until renewable energy sources and energy storage solutions become more economically competitive.”

I now understand how the various states and our next PM, Shorten, are going to obtain their 50% renewable targets. They will do so by accelerating the demise of our existing coal fired power stations. Simple! Of course the only problem is the nation a a whole will have to suffer an economic collapse. Oh well at least finally people will wake up to how destructive the left really are, and hopefully learn a good lesson never to put them back into power, be they Liberal or Labor.

woke up to ABC Brisbane promo for Steve Austin’s morning program. Austin talked of nothing basically, except for how anti-Adani protesters intend to disrupt every media appearance by the Premier – or any other politician it seems – during the Qld election campaign, getting maximum media exposure as a result. Austin then went on with his own anti-Carmichael mine rant.

31 Oct: news.com.au: Natalie Wolfe: Alan Jones vs Kevin Rudd: A love story in the making
KEVIN Rudd delivered a scathing assessment of Donald Trump on Q&A, but radio host Alan Jones turned it against him.
Here are the issues the polar opposites agreed on.
ADANI
Mr Jones’s fiery radio persona came to light when one audience member asked about the Adani mine project.
The radio shock jock cried conspiracy on the entire $21 billion proposal, citing the government’s past with foreign political donations.
“There’s something very smelly about this that the federal Liberal government, the federal Labor opposition, the Queensland Labor government and the Queensland Liberal opposition all have got their hands up saying they’re going to support this entity,” he said.
“If Indian banks won’t lend this mob any money, and the Australian banks won’t lend them any money and the ABC, this station here has done significant and exhaustive work on the duplicitous behaviour of this Adani mob,” he added.

Mr Jones, who serves as the face for anti-Adani campaign posters, had plenty of supporters in the audience and was also supported by Mr Rudd…
The former PM also agreed with Mr Jones on why the government shouldn’t touch Adani at all.
“The thing I’d not be touching with a barge pole is this business Alan referred to before — that’s two things we agree on now,” he said…

Mr Jones’s opinions on Adani didn’t just win him favour with Mr Rudd, he was also praised on Twitter, with some of his critics admitting they agreed with him.

31 Oct: Australian: Queensland election: meet Moira Williams, the former Getup! rabble-rouser
The anti-Adani protester who stormed the stage during Queensland Premier Annastacia Pala­szczuk’s first speech of the state election campaign is a former ­inner-western Sydney campaigner who defends the hiring of professional anti-coal demonstrators and has ties to GetUp!.
Moira Williams, one of the protesters holding a “#StopAdani banner” whom security removed from the stage while Ms Palaszczuk was mid-speech on Sunday, moved to Queensland in 2014 and campaigned for the Mackay Conservation Group, one of the bodies trying to overturn approvals for Adani’s Carmichael coal project in the courts.

While in Mackay Dr Williams, an ecologist, worked alongside Ellen Roberts, who is now the state’s lead organiser for GetUp! and who is listed as authorising the main stopadani.com website.
Website registration records say that internet address is owned by Getup! Ltd, and the activist body says it has provided staff and resources to help groups protest under the #StopAdani banner.
GetUp! said it had no involvement in Ms William’s actions nor another demonstration at Ms ­Palaszczuk’s campaign stop in ­Airlie Beach yesterday, but ­welcomed the “spotlight” on the anti-Adani message…
Yesterday morning, Ms ­Palaszczuk’s interview with Sky News was interrupted by another protester, who was hauled away by her security detail…

ABC news 24 weather man just announced that the failure of the sea levels to rise is due to the fact that the evaporation of seawater to supply moisture for the current high rainfalls is keeping the sea levels from rising ……….

So their climate models did take that into account because if they did the models would not be predicting the catastrophic rise in sea levels. More evidence the left are deliberately ignorant of how inadequate their models are in their propaganda.

I have a simpler answer for the lack of catastrophic sea level rise , because it’s getting warmer (because of dangerous climate change) more people are going to the beach and digging holes in the sand which are filling up with water thereby reducing the sea levels .

Yep won’t be long before Aussie politicians on both sides(Labor and Libs) will be willing sycophants in their need to copy other idiotic European “virtue signalers”.Again lobbyists
with their crony capitalist (Elon Musk)friends will easily lead them to “cleaner green “solutions
destroy wildlife (windmills),create disastrous real pollution like the nightmare of Boutou Mongolia
in refining Neyodium and the destruction of the Solare Uyuni for mining Lithium .Yes lets race into
this grand carpetbagger con with no thought of “cost benifit analysis “or any of the ” unintended
consequences “(that are really happening right now.This stuff is incredibly ridiculous and
obviously stupid however so good for the forever gullible and ruling elitists.And once again
this type of thinking will ensure the for Australia the “we have to have”
Cheers Mike

No we are not copying what the Europeans are doing. We have surpassed them and gone much further and closer to the edge of the cliff. At least the Europeans have the smarts to realise they still need nuclear and coal fired power stations, and they are still building more of them. We on the other hand are destroying our only source of cheap and reliable base load power. We are alone on this. So please don’t compare us with the Europeans as it’s unfair on them. We are already much worse than them. Both major parties here are doing their best in leading us to a catastrophic economic collapse, well before the Europeans have theirs.

Note snow forecast … for today, in my office it is 18C right now at 12.24 pm

Mid North Coast area
Partly cloudy. Medium (60%) chance of showers in the south, slight (30%) chance elsewhere. Early snow possible about the Barrington Tops above 1300 metres. Winds south to southwesterly 15 to 25 km/h tending south to southeasterly 15 to 20 km/h in the evening then becoming light in the late evening. Daytime maximum temperatures between 19 and 25.

27 Oct: Chicago Tribune: Jack Frost nipping at your nose ever later, a sign of changing climate
by Seth Borenstein, AP
Across the United States, the year’s first freeze has been arriving further and further into the calendar, according to more than a century of measurements from weather stations nationwide.
Scientists say it is yet another sign of the changing climate, and that it has good and bad consequences for the nation. There could be more fruits and vegetables — and also more allergies and pests…

The trend of ever later first freezes appears to have started around 1980, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of data from 700 weather stations across the U.S. going back to 1895 compiled by Ken Kunkel, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

To look for nationwide trends, Kunkel compared the first freeze from each of the 700 stations to the station’s average for the 20th Century. Some parts of the country experience earlier or later freezes every year, but on average freezes are coming later…

This shrinking freeze season is what climate scientists have long predicted, said University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado…

It is so impractical that it can not happen. However, the goal is likely not to force regular people to give up their privately owned ICE vehicles in favor of privately owned EVs, but to force people to give up privately own vehicles, period. A neofeudalism.

Futurologists, living national treasures, public intellectuals etc are like the dodgy plastic surgeons who turn ageing Hollywood stars to walking freaks. They deny history, distort the present and obstruct the future.

If we could know the future it would not be the future. Build what’s best for now and stop bothering those great-grandchildren before they even exist. They’ll think we’re a bit of a joke no matter what we do. Give them less to giggle at, I say.

So coal, okay? Just do coal, and do it well. Because it has splendour and power and is fit for mainstreaming.

And leave the old-fashioned, dinky niche technologies like wind and solar in their quaint little niches. (Niche is French for kennel. Yap.)

30 Oct: ElectricityInfo: Energy Costs
from UK Times (LINK):
The Cost of Energy Review, Professor Helm’s report, just published, is nonetheless important. It finds that the record of government interventions has been poor, not least because there have been far too many.

As he puts it: “The scale of the multiple interventions in the electricity market is now so great that few if any could even list them all and their interactions are poorly understood. Complexity is itself a major cause of rising costs.” Consumers are losing out.
For the past three years, in a development unforeseen by either the Department of Energy and Climate Change or the Committee on Climate Change, the prices of oil, gas and coal have fallen significantly. So too has the price of renewables. Yet thanks to policy, regulation and market design, which Professor Helm says are not fit for purpose, energy users are not benefiting.
Government interventions in pursuit of climate change targets have not only been done in a way that imposes excessive costs on consumers – officially estimated at 20% of electricity bills or more than £100bn by 2030 – but could almost have been designed to lower public support for a green strategy…

from UK Telegraph (LINK):
That Professor Helm apparently spent only four weeks of his own time on the report is cited as further grounds for scepticism. It should not; Helm has devoted much of his adult life to this stuff. Few know the territory better. His report is one of those plague-on-all-your-houses exercises; he blames just about everyone for the scandal that is the British energy market – the distribution companies for engaging in financial engineering, the regulator, Ofgem, for allowing it, National Grid for the way it operates the system that matches supply and demand, and the suppliers for not properly reflecting the fall since 2014 in the price of oil, gas, coal and renewables. But most of all he blames Government policy. The scale of multiple interventions is now so great, Helm observes, that few, if any, can even list them any longer. Complexity is itself a major cause of rising costs, and tinkering with regulation, as the Government proposes with its planned price cap, will only make things worse. But the biggest curses of all are the Government’s green and nuclear energy interventions, which through feed-in tariffs and contracts for difference unnecessarily lock consumers into what now seem usurious prices…

from UK Telegraph (LINK):
Behind the political battles over household bills lurks a far greater energy cost crisis. It risks damaging British industry and undermining attempts to boost productivity after Brexit. Households are paying more for clean power than they should, but official data shows UK bills are still below average compared to the EU. The picture is more worrying for industrial and commercial customers. In this league table UK businesses pay well above the average. The cost burden they bear is second only to Denmark. The issue is under discussion at the Treasury. Officials are clear that for the UK to attract inward investment the country needs to be competitive on energy costs, even while taking action to reduce carbon emissions…

The Helm review concluded that bungled policymaking and Governmental tinkering has meant the UK is paying “significantly” more than it should. Andrew Buckley, a director at the Major Energy Users Council (MEUC), agrees. “The report refers to decarbonisation and social policies making up 20pc of bills,” he says. “For our members we calculate that these costs will reach ***over 40pc by 2020 and this is the main reason why our industrial power bills are the amongst the most expensive in Europe.”http://electricityinfo.org/news/energy-costs-89/

30 Oct: Reuters: South Korea set for record coal imports on nuclear outages as winter looms
By Henning Gloystein
South Korea’s coal imports will hit a record in October as nuclear reactor outages bite into energy supply and the country braces for the imminent start of the peak winter demand season.
Shipping data in Thomson Reuters Eikon showed that South Korea’s September coal imports hit a record 11.3 million tonnes, and several trading sources said the October figure will be around 12 million tonnes…
The higher demand is also a result of the looming peak demand winter heating season in North Asia.

***Weather data in Thomson Reuters Eikon shows that average temperatures in Seoul would likely be slightly below the seasonal norm for the next 45 days, implying high heating fuel demand.
The situation is similar in Japan’s and China’s main cities, the data shows, although the outlook for the rest of winter is not yet clear…

Thermal coal prices are reacting to the tighter demand picture, with benchmark Australian spot cargo prices from its Newcastle port last settling at $97.10 per tonne, up over a third from its 2017 low in May.

30 Oct: Reuters: China’s Shanxi calls for gas supply ‘guarantee’ in switch from coal
by Muyu Xu and Josephine Mason
China’s top coal-producing province Shanxi called on local authorities to ensure natural gas supplies during winter and not to “blindly” push ahead with the central government’s coal-to-gas policy, state-owned news agency Xinhua reported on Monday.
“Authorities should guarantee gas supply before setting coal-to-gas conversion tasks … and ensure a minimum three-day volume of gas storage in the local region,” said a statement issued by Shanxi Development and Reform Commission (DRC), Xinhau reported.

The statement highlights growing concerns that the country’s insufficient pipeline and storage infrastructure could cause power outages during the peak winter demand season…

China’s central government vowed to improve air quality during the winter in 28 smog-prone northern cities. Its plans include the elimination of a total 44,000 coal-fired industrial boilers and replacing coal-fueled household heating with gas or electricity in millions of residences.
Shanxi must get rid of 969 industrial boilers and switch 390,000 households to natural gas heating by the end of October, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection in August…

29 Oct: Reuters: France to decide by end 2018 how many nuclear plants to shut: minister
by Mathieu Rosemain
France aims to cut the share of atomic energy in power generation to 50 percent by 2025 from 75 percent now.
Nuclear plant closures represent a touchy topic, as the sector employs thousands of people and renewable energy alternatives struggle to grow fast enough to ensure energy needs are fulfilled.
According to France’s National Council of Industry, the nuclear sector supports about 220,000 jobs, directly and indirectly.

Hulot will lay out his so-called “green deal” on energy transition in the first half of 2018, he told Le Monde in an interview.
“In order to reduce to 50 percent the share of nuclear power, we will have to close a number of reactors,” he said, adding that he would detail the exact figure under a multi-year plan to be presented at end of 2018.

Hulot said in July that as many as 17 of France’s 58 reactors may need to close to meet the target, but he did not stick to that forecast in later comments on the subject.

31 Oct: Townsville Bulletin: Fears secure and affordable electricity will be in jeopardy in North Queensland
by BETTINA WARBURTON
SECURE and affordable electricity will be in jeopardy if Katter’s Australian Party blocks any move to build a new coal-fired power station in North Queensland, the LNP says.
LNP Northern Development and Resources spokesman Andrew Cripps said KAP’s reported decision not to support lower power prices was “irresponsible”.

“The Katter Party needs to explain to the people of North Queensland and business in North Queensland why they are planning to deny the region the opportunity to secure this important piece of economic infrastructure,” he said.
“They should know that one of the serious issues for making investment decisions is uncertainty and what the Katter Party has done is create a whole heap of uncertainty in the minds of potential investors in baseload power generation in North Queensland.”
It was reported yesterday that KAP may block any move to build a coal-fired power station if it wins the balance of power in the new parliament…

But KAP state leader Robbie Katter said his party “unequivocally” supported coal-fired power “where it can be shown that it will bring down power prices”.
“However, we have a power price crisis right now,” he said.
“The LNP has as much responsibility as the current government for high electricity prices and their solution is to build a power station that won’t have any impact on prices until 2025.
“By spinning the lie that the KAP is anti-coal they are doing nothing but trying to take attention away from the fact that a coal-fired power station will take a long time to build and will not address the current electricity price problem.
“If we started today we’re eight years away at best. If anyone is saying that building a coal-fired power station will bring down prices before then, they are misleading people.”…READ ONhttp://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/news/fears-secure-and-affordable-electricity-will-be-in-jeopardy-in-north-queensland/news-story/c2b1a8afb6ffe961fb2aa06fbb5a3173

For a second there I thought oh no not the Katter party too !?
With one nation joining the greens on fracking and the Libs being ,well the Libs it’s hard to imagine Australia getting out of the mess we’re in .

BBC claiming record levels of CO2, up 3ppm, highest ever recorded. Even if accurate, who cares. Then goes on to show polar bears. Yep, polar bears. And claims CO2 = warming = harm to arctic animals. Attn BBC: polar bear numbers are on the increase you fools. Then beating the drum about “urgent action”. These people won’t easily into the night….. maybe they need a push.

30 Oct: Reuters: Thailand’s TTCL to build $2.8 bln coal-fired power plant in Myanmar
by Satawasin Staporncharnchai
The advanced technology coal-fired power station in the state of Kayin is expected to start operations in 2023 with the full 1,280 megawatts to be completed in 2024, TTCL Chief Financial Officer Gobchai Tanasugarn said.
A formal joint venture agreement, which will give TTCL a 95 percent stake and the state government 5 percent, is awaiting approval, TTCL executive vice president Suratana Trinratana said…https://af.reuters.com/article/africaTech/idAFL4N1N51MY

unfortunately, behind paywall:

30 Oct: Jakarta Post: ASEAN ministers: Coal technology key to Paris deal success
by Benjamin Sporton, Chief executive of the World Coal Association
At last month’s ASEAN energy ministers’ meeting in Manila, representatives from across the region confirmed that coal and, more specifically, high efficiency coal, is the fuel of choice for Southeast Asia. Projections forecast coal to increase its share in power generation from 32 percent in 2014 to 50 percent in 2040. During the talks the preference for coal among regional economies was…http://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2017/10/30/asean-ministers-coal-technology-key-to-paris-deal-success.html

26 Oct: PowerMag: Darrell Proctor: IEA Says Southeast Asia Will Keep Coal Demand High
IEA, which is set to release its World Energy Outlook 2017 on November 14, this week said India and Southeast Asia will account for the majority of the use of coal in the coming years, as those areas’ economies continue to grow and demand for electricity rises.
“Coal maintains a strong foothold in [Southeast Asia’s] projected consumption, not only because it is markedly cheaper than natural gas, but also because coal projects are in many cases easier to pursue as they do not require the capital-intensive infrastructure associated with gas,” the IEA said in a report in advance of the release of the November outlook.

The agency said about 100 GW of new coal-fired power generation capacity is expected to come online in Southeast Asia by 2040, increasing the region’s installed capacity to about 160 GW. The IEA said 40% of the new capacity will be built in Indonesia. The group said Vietnam, the second-largest consumer of coal in Southeast Asia behind Indonesia, will become the region’s largest importer of coal by 2040…

A report this week by Wood Mackenzie, a UK-based research and consulting firm with offices worldwide, including five in the U.S., said thermal coal imports by Southeast Asia will more than double to 226 million metric tons by 2035, up from 85 million metric tons today. The group said imports into Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and other parts of South Asia will jump to 284 million metric tons during that period, a 72% increase from this year’s levels…

Urgewald in July said more than 1,600 coal-fired power plants were either under construction or being planned in 62 countries, a number that would increase global coal-fired generation capacity by 43% over today’s levels.
Kiah Wei Giam, a principal analyst for coal and gas markets at Wood Mackenzie, this week at the Singapore International Energy Week said: “Coal is still the most affordable technology in power generation,” despite “pushback in coal development” due to concerns about pollution. Giam said coal demand will remain high at least until renewable energy sources and energy storage solutions become more economically competitive…

The U.S. coal industry also has been buoyed in recent months by increased exports of coal. According to EIA, U.S. coal exports were 62% higher year-over-year through the first seven months of 2017. EIA said that while exports are expected to slow through year-end, it forecasts 2017 exports will be about 24% higher than 2016 levels.http://www.powermag.com/iea-says-southeast-asia-will-keep-coal-demand-high/

The only reason we are wasting trillions $ and reacting to their crazy CAGW claims are easily shown to be bogus.
Many new PR SL studies have found that there is no recent measurable acceleration in the rate of SLR.
Here are a number of new studies to back up the sceptic point of view. Evidence and data should win every time. So why are the media, IPCC and the world’s govts telling porkies about their so called CAGW?

Every time I see or hear wind mills mentioned I have flash backs to the days when some scientists seriously considered using large sails to propel spaceships using the Sun’s solar wind. I laughed at them and still laugh today at the modern day variety.

totally agree. It doesn’t mean that the old technologies were completely useless before the superior tech came along. The only use for windmills today is to make money from tourists who like to see giant stones grinding grains and who then buy the flour so that they can wear away their teeth.

More solar for S Australia..
Zen encouraged by Gupta are going ahead with more solar an storage in SA.http://reneweconomy.com.au/whyalla-steel-city-goes-green-with-1gw-of-solar-and-storage-92904/
But, Jeez !.. When will they learn to understand the power and energy units, and how trivial these things are ?
They headline ” 1 GW added to supply”..
But then clearly state a 200MW solar farm, 100MW storage battery, 100MW of Demand Management”, and 120MW of pump storage….magicly giving 520MW of new supply ??
Someone should tell mr Gupta (and mr Garnaud) that the only new capacity there , will be a true average of about 40MW continuous supply !

OK, im talking to myself , so yes, probably early madness sign !….but..
There are some large holes in this proposal…
I did a little research, and found that Whyalla steel works uses 67MW at peak, so this Zen/Gupta/Garnaud plan for 200MW solar farm + batteries etc, isnt going to hack it there , let alone supplying “all the other major consumers” they talked of.
Further, there was already a plan to self generate power at the steel works using waste process gas from the site, with back up from NG ?
Knowing that gas generation is cheaper and 24/7 reliable, than solar (even buying the fuel) , i wonder what the thinking was to switch to solar ?
…i smell a profit scheme ..

The added quote is appropriate since the intent of this movement is not to save the climate but to save the most of the beauty for those that are worthy of seeing it.

Yes, save the open space for the elites and keep “the common people” caged in the cities with public transportation as their only means of moving around. Electric cars will not work, even for city use and definitely not for trips to other cities – also to be known as commoner country.

You will only see rolling fields of grain and flowers through the windows of trains, and the only trees you will be allowed to touch will be those that you can walk to. May sound far fetched, but it has a better chance of becoming reality than a return to the 20th century freedoms we had.